A Long Goodbye

By Christopher R. Beha

Jan. 4, 2013

After Mary Anne Schwalbe learned she had advanced pancreatic cancer, in 2007, her son Will suggested she start a blog to keep family and friends informed. Schwalbe liked the idea but worried it was “unseemly” to broadcast news about herself, so she asked her son to write it instead. The blog became “Will’s Mary Anne ­Schwalbe News.” When Mary Anne decided it would be “easier” if she composed the first entry, she dictated in the third person for Will to type and post — a practice that continued until the blog’s, and Mary Anne’s, last days.

This wasn’t the only project mother and son embarked upon together during her illness. Mary Anne, a lifelong reader, and Will, then the editor in chief of a major publishing house, began trading books to discuss when Will accompanied his mother to her chemotherapy sessions. As its title suggests, these discussions are the ostensible subject of Will Schwalbe’s memoir, “The End of Your Life Book Club.” But just as the books themselves served as excuses for Mary Anne and Will to talk of difficult things — particularly mortality — the book club serves here as an excuse for a loving celebration of a mother by a son.

Certainly Mary Anne Schwalbe comes across in these pages as a woman worth celebrating. A Radcliffe graduate, she worked as a theatrical casting agent before taking this skill for talent evaluation to her alma mater’s admissions office. (She eventually became the director of admissions for both Radcliffe and Harvard.) After she and her husband moved their family to New York, Mary Anne held prominent positions at local private schools, first Dalton and then Nightingale-Bamford, before a visit to a refugee camp in Thailand inspired a late-life career change. Schwalbe helped found the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, which she directed for several years. Her work with the organization brought her to Afghanistan, Liberia and Sudan, among other war-torn places to which she fearlessly traveled. Until the end of her life, she was the kind of woman who, after striking up a conversation with a fellow customer at the pharmacy, finds her way to paying for the medication the woman can’t afford. Even in her final months, she seemed less concerned with her own condition than with raising money to start a traveling library in Kabul.

All of this her son outlines in an amiable, conversational style that is often charming but ultimately unsatisfying. The book is chatty not just in its tone — Mary Anne is referred to throughout almost exclusively as “Mom” — but in its form, or rather its essential formlessness. Though each chapter is named after a book, they aren’t always books the Schwalbes read together. When they are, the discussions are perfunctory. (In the chapter named for T. S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral,” Schwalbe quotes his mother as saying, simply, “I find the play very inspiring.”) Discussions of Will’s childhood or his own late-life career change — he quit his job and started a cooking Web site — mingle with descriptions of his mother’s treatments and synopses of popular novels.

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Mary Ann Schwalbe and her children, including Will Schwalbe, at left; circa 1967.CreditRobert H. Chapman/Courtesy Will Schwalbe

At one point, Schwalbe recalls a childhood Christmas when his mother read the Nativity story to him and his siblings by the fire. “So Mom was reading,” Schwalbe writes; “the fireplace was glowing; we three children were all around her. And then one of us started to giggle. I’m not even sure which one of us it was. Well, truthfully I am, but even after all these years it would seem like ratting out a sibling to name a name.”

This is a kind of joke, and yet it gets at another problem with “The End of Your Life Book Club.” Discretion and familial loyalty are fine characteristics, and it may be one more tribute to Mary Anne ­Schwalbe to say that her son displays them in excess. But these are not qualities that make for a scintillating memoir. To paraphrase Joan Didion, a writer is always ratting somebody out. A great memoirist, even one moved primarily by love and devotion, must possess a certain amount of ruthlessness — toward himself if no one else. Schwalbe’s book contains little of the lacerating honesty that marks Didion’s recent memoirs of loss.

There is an effort, admirable in theory but regrettable on the page, to credit every person who helped along the way, leading to dutiful but less-than-thrilling sentences: “Dr. Foley and Nessa work in tandem with Dr. O’Reilly at Memorial Sloan-Kettering and specialize in helping cancer patients and their families with both quality-of-life concerns during treatment and also end-of-life care.” Or, discussing his mother’s work with the International Rescue Committee: “She’d founded the I.R.C.-U.K. a decade earlier, and it now contributed more than £30 million a year to the I.R.C.’s overall budget, as well as having programs of its own.” After reading such sentences, one is hardly surprised to discover that Will’s mother, having learned of his intention to write this book, sent him a series of e-mails urging him to include the story of a young refugee from Sierra Leone or the urgent need for health care reform. “The End of Your Life Book Club” too often reads like “Will’s Mary Anne Schwalbe Book.”

Conversely, the best parts of Schwalbe’s memoir are those that it would not have pleased his mother to read. Occasionally he hints at the hardly surprising fact that having a mother at once so controlling and so extravagantly selfless — one who writes the cards with which she wants her family to respond to condolence notes; one who replies, when asked how she feels after a blood transfusion, “A little guilty to be taking that much blood” — can be infuriating. Schwalbe first learned about mortality, he writes, when his mother donated his beloved stuffed-toy turtle to an orphanage and then told him the turtle had died. The giving away of the turtle might have made for a charming family anecdote; it is the thoughtlessness of the explanation that brings the reader up short. Similarly, the story of the children laughing by the fireplace ends with Schwalbe’s mother slamming the Bible shut and announcing, “Maybe this year there won’t be a Christmas.” Playing the loyal son, Schwalbe finds a lesson in his mother’s threat to cancel Christmas: the written word should be treated with respect. But the more obvious lesson is that Mary Anne Schwalbe, like every other human, sometimes got angry and sometimes hurt the people she loved. These stories do no harm to the woman. Quite the opposite; they honor her by rendering her complete. As a more complicated picture of Mary Anne emerges, her son’s dedication becomes only more poignant.

One of this book’s most moving passages occurs near the end, in a description of Mary Anne’s final days. After almost two years of dictation, Mary Anne is too ill to compose her blog posts. For the first time, Will himself writes the message that goes out under his name. He shows it to his mother for her approval, and she adds a few lines about President Obama and the need for health care reform. The next day she isn’t well enough even to look over Will’s post; he must write it entirely without her. “Mom’s illness is progressing quickly,” it bluntly begins. We are past the point of fund-­raising pleas or polite nods to the palliative care staff. Instead we read the words of a man who is losing a person he loves and is helpless to do anything about it. These pages are stirring for all the reasons one might think, but also for the subtle way they hint at what “The End of Your Life Book Club” might have been.

THE END OF YOUR LIFE BOOK CLUB

By Will Schwalbe

336 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.

Christopher R. Beha is an associate editor of Harper’s Magazine and the author, most recently, of the novel “What Happened to Sophie Wilder.”